Second World War

World War II marks both a generational rupture and a test of the Breitsprecher-Duke business: Conrad is called to serve even as family connections protect Raphael and Claude, and his return in 1945 changes how he sees the seedlings he had left behind. The war also prompts experiments in wood products, but the company’s postwar survival rests on plywood rather than the hardboard it abandons.

Background and Call-Up

In 1939, the approach of war seems to older people like the continuation of a conflict they had lived through, returning after just enough time for a new generation of young men to grow up. The narrative places this recurrence within an emerging pattern: roughly every twenty-five years, another war propels the human world into a destructive cycle of boom and collapse. That perspective makes the war more than a distant political event; it threatens to repeat itself through the lives of the young.

The Breitsprechers and Dukes have avoided military service for generations, but Conrad is called up. Raphael and Claude know people who can help them; Conrad’s connections are limited to Al McErlane and forestry professors. His work growing nursery seedlings is not considered a vital agricultural occupation, and his place in the family business offers no exemption. The contrast exposes the unequal protection afforded by influence and makes Conrad’s call-up a break in the family’s accustomed immunity.

Conrad’s Return

Conrad comes back from the South Pacific in 1945 physically and emotionally changed. The experience has altered his ideas and beliefs, although the account does not detail the events that produced those changes. When he shakes Al McErlane’s hand and walks again through the greenhouses, the sturdy young pines strike him as the most beautiful things he has ever seen. The seedlings, once part of his ordinary work, have acquired a new weight after his return; the scene registers change through his altered attention to what is growing.

Wartime Production and Its Limits

During the war, Breitsprecher-Duke experiments with interior and exterior hardboard siding. Two years of moisture problems defeat the project. One trial uses seaweed and corn-husk pulp, but the company abandons hardboard and concentrates on Brite-Ply, its plywood made from culls and forest-fire salvage. The wartime effort therefore produces experimentation without a lasting new siding business, while waste wood and fire-damaged timber become inputs for the product the company does continue to make.

After the war, the company catches only the tail end of the building boom. Larger firms supplied with cheaper Canadian wood push it into decline. Yet an image of a productive, busy enterprise persists around James Bardawulf Breitsprecher and Andrew Harkiss, who photograph well beside log piles and rotary peelers. The account undercuts those impressive surfaces by comparing them to plywood: an outer layer that conceals inferior material. Wartime adaptation keeps the concern alive, but does not protect it from the commercial pressure that follows.

Significance

The war’s consequences extend beyond enlistment and factory decisions. It interrupts the company’s usual inheritance of protected service, sending Conrad away while the family’s established connections shield others. His 1945 return links the experience of war to a renewed regard for the nursery’s living stock, while the company’s failed hardboard experiments and dependence on Brite-Ply show how wartime ingenuity could sustain production without reversing longer-term decline. In this account, survival is uneven: the family business persists, but neither its public image nor its industrial adaptability can restore the security it once appeared to possess.